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The Common Good? The challenge at this critical moment as we cross the threshold to the next millennium is not defining it, but securing and preserving it in the face of globalization and the forces it has set loose. For we are in danger of losing the commons, our public and civic soul that defines us as a nation and as a people.
The idea of the common good is as old as our notion of politics. It refers to those goods held by a people in common, such collective goods as public education, culture, penology, and law. It is closely linked to the idea of a republic-which quite literally refers to those public things (the res publica) around which a constitution is created. To hold things in common is the preface to governing in common, which is why republicanism is generally the condition for democracy. It is, in fact, the set of terms around democracy, including citizenship, civic liberty, community and the commons, that are put at risk by the forces associated with globalization.
These forces, of which I will draw a series of quick portraits, include the privatization of what is globalized, the commercialization of what is privatized, and the infantilization of privatized consumers-with a resulting world that is deeply inimical not only to the common good but to pluralism, diversity, and the heterogeneity that is its special virtue. Citizens become mere individuals, individuals become consumers, consumers become impulsive children who, at the same time, become indistinguishable from impulsive children everywhere.
Globalization
I have examined the dynamics of globalization at some length in my book Jihad vs. McWorld and will not rehearse its arguments here. But it is impossible to go around the issue of globalization and its entailments if we want to understand why the common good seems so precarious in our national life today. Nor will it suffice, as some critics have argued, to trivialize our current era of internationalization by comparing it to what in some ways seems an analagous period before World War I. It is certainly true that in the period at the end of the nineteenth century's age of empires, there was an internationalization of economics on a very large scale. If one measures international trade...